FRANCE:Candidate's vision of tackling alienation, clearing debts and global dialogue is paying off, writes Lara Marlowein Paris
After a steady diet of Ségo-Sarko for the past year, millions of French voters have gone off the pugnacious right-wing interior minister and the shifting socialist who takes herself for Jeanne d'Arc.
A poll published by Le Figaro newspaper yesterday showed that François Bayrou would beat either Nicolas Sarkozy or Ségolène Royal in the May 6th run-off - if only he can make it past the first round on April 22nd.
"I always believed that France needed an alternative solution to the two parties that have succeeded each other in government eight times in the last 25 years," Bayrou said in the studios of TV5Monde yesterday. "Two-thirds of the French say the lives of their children will be more difficult than their own. This demoralisation is an appeal for change."
Bayrou sought to charm the foreign journalists who had come to hear him record the France 2007 programme. Aunts and uncles who were doctors in Cameroon projected home movies of Africa on the wall of the dining room when he was a child, he told an African journalist. One of his great grandfathers married a woman from Shanghai, he told a Chinese journalist, adding: "I've always seen it in the eyes of our family." A great-uncle fought in the Dardanelles, he told a Turkish woman. "My only ancestor who was not from Béarn [ southwest France] was a Dorgan from Cork!" he told The Irish Times.
Bayrou's foreign policy sounds similar to President Jacques Chirac's. "I want a multipolar world, organised in large unions," the candidate said. "The European Union, a South American union, a more developed African Union, China, India, Russia, a union of the Far East. We will have a world based on several pillars that are able to hold a dialogue."
American unilateralism was "a trap for the world and for the United States," Bayrou continued. "It has done a great deal of harm to the image of the US in the world, and it has considerably weakened its influence." He was proud that Chirac opposed the invasion of Iraq. Like Chirac, he wants France "to carry a project for society, first in Europe, then on the world stage." About 940,000 French people are registered to vote abroad, and Mr Bayrou spared a special thought for them. "They have the feeling their country has broken down, that it's stalling, falling apart . . . an umpteenth alternation in government is not going to get us out of this quagmire," he said.
Bayrou criticised Sarkozy for not campaigning in the immigrant banlieues, and Royal for not going there often, as he does. "The banlieue is evidence of the decomposition of the society we live in," Bayrou said. "It will take not five years but a long-term plan, perhaps 10 years, to re-establish an equilibrium."
Asked what he thought of Sarkozy's controversial proposal for a "ministry of immigration and national identity", Bayrou assumed a scandalised air. "How can one systematically target one part of society, a few million people?" he asked, alluding to African and North African Arab minorities.
"There is a clash in these two words [ immigration and identity]," Bayrou continued, "a message for those who're intended to hear it. It's a wink to those who believe that France is threatened in its existence by a population that have lived among us for decades . . . We don't have the right to create such a tense atmosphere in our country, where people watch each other with suspicion."
The exchange rate for Chinese currency is artificially low, Bayrou said. In the interest of free trade, it would have to be "discussed in a serene manner". But he categorically rejected Sarkozy and Royal's calls for the European Central Bank to weaken the euro. Prices and interest rates would shoot up, and the burden of France's debt would be even more crippling.
France's debt has reached €1,214 billion, and that increases by €1,800 every second. The government hasn't balanced a budget since 1980. Bayrou denounced his rivals' "rash promises", "blank cheques" and "Santa's satchel" as "demagoguery". By devoting half of the country's tax revenues to debt reduction, he could stabilise the debt in three years, he said.
François Bayrou can be seen on TV5Monde Europe tonight at 8pm.